For years, I kept my secret sins hidden until God busted them wide open in 2011. God used my public and private confessions to begin my healing and redemption. I learned that what happens behind closed doors at home, the church, the office, and everywhere else can "make or break us." God works in the Light (1 John 1:5)while evil thrives in darkness/secrecy (Ephesians 5:8-13). This is a blog about my journey.

Friday, August 1, 2014

Keep Knocking (i.e. Praying)

This is a great devotional (see below) that helps me feel better about my repeated "persistent" and/or repetitive prayers about the same things it seems. Keep pounding the door! God can handle it!
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Jesus’
story about village neighbors must have provoked smiles and chuckles in
his first-century audience. A man opens his door to an unexpected guest
late one night - not uncommon in a
desert climate that encourages travel after sunset - only to find his
pantry bare. In a region renowned for hospitality, no decent person
would turn away a weary traveler or put him to bed without nourishment,
so the host strikes out to a friend’s house to
ask for bread.Kenneth
Bailey, a Presbyterian missionary who lived in Lebanon forty years,
illuminates some of the cultural nuances behind the story. Palestinians
use bread as Westerners use silverware:
they break off bite-sized pieces, dip into a common dish of meat and
vegetables, and eat the entire sop. The man with empty cupboards was
likely asking his friend for a main course as well as loaves of bread,
and even that was typical. Villagers frequently
borrowed from each other in hospitality emergencies. Bailey recalls one
instance: “While living in primitive Middle Eastern villages, we
discovered to our amazement that this custom of rounding up from the
neighbors something adequate for the guest extended
even to us when we were the guests. We would accept an invitation to a
meal clear across the village, and arrive to eat from our own dishes
which the villagers had borrowed quietly from our cook.”

In
Jesus’ story, though, the neighbor stubbornly refuses the request (see
Luke 11). He has already gone to bed, stretched out with his family on a
mat in the one-room house - and, besides,
the door is bolted shut. “Don’t bother me,” he calls to his neighbor
outside. “I can’t get up and give you anything.”

A
Middle Eastern audience would have laughed out loud at this lame
excuse. Can you imagine such a neighbor? Jesus was asking. Certainly
not! No one in my village would act so rudely. If
he did, the entire village would know about it by morning!Then
Jesus delivers the punch line: “I tell you, though he will not get up
and give him the bread because he is his friend, yet because of the
man’s boldness [his persistence, his shamelessness]
he will get up and give him as much as he needs.” The application to
prayer follows immediately:

So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.

Luke
positions this story right after Jesus’ teaching on the Lord’s Prayer,
drawing a sharp contrast between the reluctant neighbor and God the
Father. If a cranky neighbor who has turned
in for the night, who wishes more than anything you would go away, who
does his best to ignore you - if such a neighbor eventually rouses to
give what you want, how much more will God respond to your bold
persistence in prayer! After all, what earthly father
would sneak a snake under his son’s pillow when he asks for a fish, or
drop a scorpion on his daughter’s breakfast plate instead of an egg?

The
Lord’s Prayer, often reduced to a mumbled ritual, an incantation, takes
on new light in this story abutting it. We should pray like a salesman
with his foot wedged in the door opening,
like a wrestler who has his opponent in a headlock and won’t let go.

The
God “who watches over you will not slumber,” promises a psalm of
comfort. Even so, sometimes when we pray it feels as if God has indeed
nodded off. Raise your voice, Jesus’ story implies.
Strive on, like the shameless neighbor in the middle of the night.Keep pounding the door.* * *Your TurnAsk
seek knock... Easier said than done when it seems that God isn't
answering the door! Have you quit praying about something because you
didn't get an answer right away?
Don't stop! Be persistent! Keep knocking!

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About Me

Our goal is to help married couples and/or families walk in the Light of Christ's love, freedom, truth, and experience healing and wholeness, "for better or worse." God's design for marriage and the family is best but is counter-culture and won't come without a fight. Ephesians 3:20 (NIV).